Hi.....! The very reason I just this minute joined these forums is to try and explore this question with people familiar with primitivism and John Zerzan. Of course, I've know of John Zerzan for a while, but its only fairly recently (i/ve only been online about a year), like lst couple of days where i have really been getting into him. I read this long article 'Different ways of Knowing' and have been watching very powerful video at Youtube called Dead Society that has deeply upset me, cause they show animals who have been abused by so-called fukin science-ists! Now, I have to say that my leaning for many years before have been Goddess religious oriented. And a big influence for me has been the writings and art of Monica Sjoo But in his article, Zerzan claims that the Mother Goddess myth was a Neolithic attempt to put right what already was leading to what we got now. ie., he claims it failed. Now....i had thought the concept of Mother Goddess was even earlier than Neolithic? But really for now I want to focus on the genesis Garden of Eden myth. This myth has fascinated me since being a kid cause of its imagery, and drama Now, Zerzan mentions it in that article and says how 'God' expells Adam and Eve from Paradise, and into the drugery of agricultural labour. Now help me here. How come a patriarchal God is doing this. as though 'he' represents paradise. because from what i have learned from radical feminists like Sjoo who deconctrust that patriarchal myth, what it is about is dissassociating us FROm Nature, by de-sacrilizing Nature So how can it also be a warning about the desacrilization of paradise? get me What do you think that myth is about, from a primitivist perspective?
This forum doesn't see too much action. Maybe if you give it a few days or give the Pagan forum a shot; it sees a little more traffic. I'm not a primitivist nor feminist nor a big fan of the Eden myth but I'll think on it. Though my first gut reaction is to say that the myth is more about power play than anything else. With so many different versions/telling of the myth I think it sometimes gets a little dodgey when it comes to deconstruction. To support an argument (especially with an agenda) you're going to chose a version that has the wording/translation that is easiest to support your claim - and by that virtue alone, I think you're going to get some despairing views even from writers who appear to be on similar sides of the fence, as it were.
I would put it in the Christian forum. Most Christians will have to look up primitivism so you might want to rephrase it before posting there. The Garden of Eden myth actually predates the bible, and some would argue that Genesis itself is an ancient work outside of the bible itself. It was picked up by the Hebrews and incorporated into what was to later become Judaism. There's a good chance it came to them by the Greeks and their ability to read and write among early man. It most likely was an oral tradition for a long time before writing was invented. From a spiritual point of view, this is a story of how humans once were "with God", and how we willingly came to this low level of existance called earth. Good and evil came about as we aqquired our human minds and it's ability to weigh one thing against another. x
i think what its about is a warning about the perils of aggressiveness, one that got distorted be the vested suport of hierarchal concepts, that may also have been someone's first man myth. i think what's interesting is if you coun't all those thousand year 'begats' that came after and add them to the known revelations of that lineage you come up with arround 24,000 years, which i think would indeed put us back there in olduvoi. and spritual texts aren't really concerence with the origens of rocks or even trees primarily except as aligorical metaphores. the eden story, or something like it, like the many of its ilk, but different, from many places, along with that 'begat's list', might well be something verbaly transmitted for a couple of tens of thousands of years before the invention of litteracy. as for the rest of the scholarly analysis, well, all approaches can pretty much only be speculative. and one of the things about indiginous beliefs, those i've had some little contact with, is they tend to avoid the kind of attatchment to the kind of detailed speculations on the unseen that we find in more dominant and further from nature beliefs. the unseen is just that little critter on the other side of that tree, and MAYBE what its thinking, and MAYbe there's something more unseen beyond that, or the spiritness of its species. not saying bigger things can't or don't exist, but the spirit of that kind of creature that might be behind that tree is interesting because it might offer itself to us to have something to eat for dinner this evening. or it might be a generous hunter like ourselves willing to share our kills with each other. certainly that close to natureness kind of living is what a universal 'garden of eden' is. i guess you could call that a 'primitivist' perspective. but there are implications to that term "primitivist" that encompass arrogantly chauvanistic absurdities of cultures since and currently more dominant. i prefer such terms as indiginous perspectives and indiginous beliefs for that reason. though those terms also imply learning directly from the keepers of such traditions rather then something we might read in a book about them. one can, also though, learn directly from the spiritness of the land, the rocks and the trees and whatever kinds of life forms, right where you are, and nearly all indiginous perspectives accord that also, if it is honest and genuine, at least a certain, sometimes great, degree of ligitimacy. =^^= .../\...
Maybe my comments will get some more discussion on this. Unfortunatley, like themnax says---such scholarly analysis can only be speculation. I am not familiar with the writings of Zerzan---I will have to check that out----but here is my feelings on your questions. It fits in with things I have written under the Shinto thread. I have been working on a book, hopefully I'll get it written one of these days---that explores what I feel is the oldest word in the human language. I have traced the basic etymological root through languages in every part of the globe. I have traced words that are part of the archetypical constellation that surrounds this word through languages in every part of the globe, and find a common theme in both phonetics and etymology connected to this same word. The word has become crude in modern English, but it was obviously a very sacred word to last so long through so many languages---it is the 'c' word. Why is this word so special---it is etymological proof that man has a common origin. that his spirituality has a common origin. It tells us that to early man, the most powerful, magical, spiritual event was the birth of a child/animal. And in the human, this amazing organ was so full of medicine, that it was able to produce blood---the liquid of life force---without harming the woman, at a cycle that mimicked the celestial cycle of the moon. We know that prehsitoric man understood this because of such artifacts as a paleolithic lunar calendar in the shape of a vulva. So this suggests that the feminine element of nature was very significant before the Neolithic, even back into the primal shamanistic spirituality of mankind. In fact, the blood sacrifice that is found among hunter-gatherers up to recent times (those who have traditions that may go back to the paleolithic), I believe is only half of the original blood sacrifice----the blood sacrifice is significant not only for the moment of death (to feed Mother Earth and to bring the dead, or the game back to our world) but also for that of birth---therefore the blood sacrifice refers also to the menses----from the birth canal to the grave. I believe there is mythical precedence for this. (Coincidentally, the blood sacrifice survived even into the Hebraic tribes---you could only get to Jehovah through the blood sacrifice. The sacrifice of Jesus effectively did away with the blood sacrifice for the sake of Western religion---and provided an effective step further from the sacredness of the feminine). In most cultures, as the men hunted, women gathered. It therefore makes sense that it was women who discoverd that seeds left in the ground would sprout. Likewise, it was women who had the vagina and the womb that would be the most symbolically significant to life being born of the earth, and therefore the most signifcant at the dawn of agriculture. Man was neccessary for fecundity, for fertilization, but it was woman, and mother earth, who were fertile, and who were productive. As mankind shifted from hunter-gathering to agriculture and animal herding, villages formed, then cities, city states, and eventually states. In order to assure survival, mankind had to switch from the individualism of a hunter to the group effort to grow enough crops to survive. A group ethic required the rise of institutions. The spirituality of shamanism gave way to the birth of religion----and at this early juncture, for the reasons above, this religion was the goddess cults. So in this sense---the goddess cults began, like all religion, at the dawn of civilization in the neolithic. But the goddess was significant long before that. But I have also found evidence in numerous aboriginal languages (and vestigial roots in modern languages) that point to a common etymology between the phallus and the vagina, and a few cases where the feminine root k-n-t (or its variation) applies to the penis instead. So obviously the male had his importance too---like the yin and the yang. Besides, the shaman or shamaness naturally experiences both male and female spirits. ----but obviously the feminine had a stronger significance. There is a common etymology of the masculine, both referring to the penis and the male god, particularly the warrior-sky-god, but it is not as universal, and seems to be of a later origin.
